The Dead on Culloden's Field
The Sky Boat was just like any other Guild ship that Yan had been on or seen, and she had seen plenty. She pointed it out to Sid as they stood in Emerri Station, the huge port that sat squat atop the space elevator reaching up from the planet’s surface. Sid, who had also been on his share of Guild vessels going back and forth from his home planet of Galena over the summers, was duly unimpressed by the huge hulk of rock that blinked into existence outside Emerri Station’s windows, then maneuvered with its sub-light engines into position to dock and exchange cargo.
Yan took one last look at Emerri below them, seeing the edge of the night where the planet turned away from its star and slipped into shadow, the pale greens, the swirling clouds covering the northern continent like a thick blanket. Sylva was down there; Yan could pick out the bright cluster of lights that formed the capital, clinging to the ocean. Sandreas was there, too, and Halen, and Kino. It was strange to have this last glance at Emerri, and have it feel like leaving home, rather than coming home. She wasn’t travelling to her family and the Iron Dreams , but to somewhere far, far away.
“Ready to board?” Iri asked, coming up behind Yan. Their whole entourage comprised some twenty people: Yan, Sid, Iri Maedes as Yan’s minder, Sid’s minder Hernan, the Fleet lieutenant who was supervising their travel, and the remainder of the group was made up of Fleet soldiers as guards. Yan didn’t know them at all, but they had all seemed friendly and capable enough.
“Yes, ma’am,” Yan said. Iri grinned and shoved Yan’s shoulder.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Iri said. “This trip is a tenday-- is that long, for spacers?”
Yan thought about this for a second. “In some ways,” she said. “If my family was running between Olar and Emerri, we’d be visiting at least one or two different other places on the way, so it’d probably take us twice that to get between the two planets. But since we’d be stopping along the way, it would be less time between ports.”
Iri nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Have you never been to space before?”
“Oh, I have,” Iri said. “A couple times. I used to be in First Sandreas’ personal guard detail, so I travelled aboard the First Star several times. But that’s different-- that ship is very fast.”
“I didn’t know that,” Yan said.
“Come on,” Iri said, “let’s board.”
It felt doubly strange to be wearing her uniform cassock as the whole group left the rotating rings of Emerri station and headed into the tunnel that connected them to the Sky Boat . When she had gone home for the summers, she had always worn a spacer’s jumpsuit-- one marked with the Iron Dreams’ insignia. She hadn’t stood out at all, then, not even her height, which was perfectly average as far as spacers went. So much of her life had been on board ships, and, in another lifetime, Yan might have been welcome aboard this ship as a journeyman worker, looking for a life outside her family. When they were met at the entrance to the Sky Boat , her cape flying out behind her made her feel garish and out of place, the weight suddenly strangling her shoulders.
The Sky Boat ’s captain, Lida Migollen, was a sharp-faced woman who was shorter than most spacers. Her red hair was cut quite close to her face, and she had a nasty scar that traveled across one side of her nose and down her cheek. She looked at Yan and Sid with an expression that bordered on disdain.
“You’re First Sandreas’ apprentices, then?” she asked, not offering her hand to shake.
“Yes, Captain,” Yan said. “I’m Yan BarCarran, and this is Sid Welslak.”
“Can he not introduce himself?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” Sid said, grinning and unmoved by Captain Lida’s sharpness.
Lida did not take that comment as well as Sandreas would have. The way her eyes flicked away from Sid and back to Yan made it clear that she would not be speaking to him unless she needed to. Yan wanted to kick him to make him behave, but it was possible that Lida would not like either of them, regardless of Sid’s behavior.
“You’re worth more than your weight in gold, the both of you,” Lida said. “The changes to our normal route were not insubstantial.”
“Thank you for going to the trouble,” Yan said.
“The Imperial government pays well, at least. Though I question why you didn’t take First Sandreas’ ship.”
“He’s visiting the front,” Yan said. “This trip was unexpected.”
Lida nodded. “Well, come in. We won’t be jumping again for another eight hours, so make yourselves comfortable. You may join my family in the mess for meals, of course.”
Yan wasn’t sure what the alternative was; passengers didn’t have their own kitchens on ships-- no one did-- so unless they were planning on eating dry rations for the whole tenday crossing, they would be dining with the crew. “Of course,” Yan said.
“Glad you do not expect your meals to be catered.” And, for the first time, there was a hint of humor in the older woman’s voice.
“Captain, I’ve been a spacer far longer than I’ve been First Sandreas’ apprentice,” Yan said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to catered meals.”
“Indeed,” Lida said, voice dry.
They were ushered into the narrow hallways of the ship itself, then onto the rotating rings, running at about one-third Emerri gravity. Yan adjusted to it immediately, but Sid managed to hit his head on the ceiling when he first stepped into the ring.
“Why are they running the rings so light?” he signed to Yan after he had finished rubbing his head.
“Personal choice,” Yan replied. Her own family typically ran the rings on half of standard gravity. Running the gravity lighter had several advantages. Over the long run, it saved on the wear and tear on the ship, and spacers who were used to it often found it easier to maneuver and work in lower-gravity environments. It could be disorienting for strangers, though.
Yan and Sid had been assigned rooms next to each other in the passenger section of the Sky Boat . Because space was at a premium in the ship’s rings, the rooms were small, and they shared a bathroom. This was better than their Fleet accompaniment got, however, who were four to a room and had to use the hall bathrooms. Yan didn’t mind the small space in the least, but Sid wandered into her room through the adjoining bathroom and signed, “How are you going to fit on that bed?” with a wry grin. Passenger rooms on ships were sized to fit the standard planet-dweller, and so the bed was shorter than Yan was, stretched out.
“I fit,” Yan replied. “I’m not that tall.”
“Beanstalk.”
“You’d be my height, too, if you grew up on a ship like this.”
Sid stuck out his tongue, then laid on Yan’s bed, kicking his feet up onto the wall. It was difficult to read his sign from the odd angle he was at, so Yan was forced to stand looming directly over him so that they could converse. “Can’t wait to spend ten days with that captain who hates us,” Sid signed.
“You didn’t have to be rude.”
“I wasn’t rude.”
“You were pushing it. You can get away with things with Sandreas because…” She shrugged. “He knows how to put up with you. I think you’re supposed to learn how to be more professional.”
“Everyone is going to have to learn to deal with me when I’m First.” Sid was still grinning.
Yan just laughed and shook her head. “I think good money’s on Kino, actually.”
“You have got to be kidding me.” Sid reached behind himself and grabbed the pillow to hit Yan with it.
“I’m serious!” Yan yelped. She dodged his blows, and when he stopped, dropping the pillow on the ground, she was able to sign again. “People have seen the way you act, and they don’t like that I’m a spacer. I’m surprised you haven’t looked at the betting market.”
“Sick thing for people to bet on.”
Yan shrugged. “There’s worse.”
Sid was frowning, but asked, “So, what are the actual odds?”
“I don’t know precisely,” Yan lied. “Look them up yourself before the ship jumps.”
----------------------------------------
Dinner that night with the crew of the Sky Boat was a slightly awkward affair. Captain Lida was nowhere to be seen, which left her first officer, her son Joun, to do his best approximation of entertaining the important guests during the meal.
The mess hall was so like the one aboard the Iron Dreams , complete with large window out into the darkness of space, showing the stars slipping by as the ring rotated. The opposite wall was covered in photographs and memorabilia of the Migollen family, all neatly arranged, smiling redheads. The room was filled with long tables and benches, and everyone got their own food on trays from the serving station that looked into the hot industrial kitchen. One of the tables was just long enough to fit all of the apprentices’ party, plus Joun, who kept sneaking amused glances across the room at some of his family members, who Yan suspected were gossiping about their guests.
“How come Captain Lida doesn’t like us?” Sid asked Joun almost as soon as they had all sat down with their food. Yan cringed and poked at her stir fry and rice with her fork.
“It’s not that she doesn’t like you,” Joun said, taking Sid’s abrasiveness in stride. He had a deep, friendly voice, though Yan could tell that he was looking down on Sid, in the way that all spacers did. “She just hates filing travel plans, and she hates the annoyance of rearranging our route.”
“She didn’t have to take us,” Sid said.
“On short notice, we were the fastest ship available. And she owed a favor, which convinced her to take the job.”
“To whom?” Yan asked, curious.
“Banmei Olms, of the Neutron Star .”
“And why does owing a favor to him--” Sid began.
“You’re meeting with Yuuni Olms, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure which of Guildmaster Vaneik’s apprentices would be there.”
“I would put money on it being her,” Joun said. “Vaneik likes to send her places.”
“Not Thule?” Yan asked, bringing up Vaneik’s other apprentice.
“I have no idea what Thule gets up to,” Joun said. “But I see Olms running across the Empire like a madwoman. She’s everywhere.”
“I see,” Sid said.
“But my mother just hates carrying government passengers.”
“Why?” Sid asked again.
“Like I said, the route filing,” Joun said. “It really defeats the purpose of the Guild charter, for a ship to have to be accountable to port authorities for anything other than getting where they need to go on time.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Yan said. Filing a route with the ports was a risk and a tradeoff-- leaving the places where the ship would be jumping en route meant that if that information was leaked to pirates, the ship would be in danger of being found and attacked, but if the ship was attacked by pirates, survivors might be rescuable, to be searched for when the ship failed to return to port.
The lead of their Fleet escort, a gangly man named Lieutenant Cesper, spoke up. Cesper was a few years older than Yan, and seemed apprehensive about the responsibility that had been entrusted to him, as well as a little nervous about Yan and Sid. She wasn’t sure why that was, and she hoped that he would get used to them; he seemed nice enough. “It’s required for government contracts.”
“Trust me,” Joun said. “I’m well aware.”
“Well, we’re not likely to see any pirates,” Sid said.
Joun chuckled. “No? You don’t think that someone could put a price on your pretty little head?”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Sid said.
Yan certainly hoped that was the case.
----------------------------------------
After seven days aboard the Sky Boat , Yan was both feeling better about the crew and their journey, and feeling the first touches of stir-craziness, the kind that only came from not having any tasks to do. If she had been on her family’s ship, she would have been working shifts around the ship, doing something useful. If she had been at work on Emerri, she would have had a full schedule with new and interesting things to do every day. But here, no matter how she lurked near the greenhouse and asked if anyone might like a hand, or stuck her head in the kitchen and offered to wash some dishes, or wandered down to the workshops and tried to offer her assistance with maintenance tasks, everyone very politely rejected her help. She suspected that they were laughing behind her back.
She hated feeling useless, and it was making her nauseous and twitchy. Meditating didn’t even really help, because she could feel the heavy pressure of the stardrive in the center of the ship, a constant reminder that she was in space but not at home.
Sid was also driving her a little insane, as he had absolutely zero problems lounging around doing as little as physically possible, and he tried to explain to Yan exactly how he was entertaining himself. She didn’t understand how he didn’t have the same itchy feeling in his gut, the gnawing uselessness.
“You grew up on a farm, right?” Yan asked.
“Yeah. Why?” Sid was using the power to peel a bunch of grapes that he had taken from the mess, and was leaving the empty skins in a wet pile on Yan’s desk. It was a rather macabre way of eating a fruit that did not in any way need to be peeled. He levitated the skinless grapes into his mouth one by one.
“Your parents make you work?”
“Of course.”
“It’s like, if you were on a farm, and everyone was telling you to just relax, that you didn’t have to do any work, that you could just sit around and let everyone else take care of everything, wouldn’t you feel weird about it?”
“No,” Sid signed.
“Maybe this is why people are betting against you.”
Sid threw one of the grapes at her face with the power, but Yan used her own to stop it, and the ensuing psychic battle ended with the grape exploding, tiny particles spattering her face. Yan sneezed and wiped her face on her cassock sleeve.
“How much longer until we’re at Olar and you can feel like a useful human again?”
Yan checked the time. She had a countdown timer on her phone that was timed to the exact length of time between the Sky Boat ’s jumps. This ship was marginally larger than the Iron Dreams , so its jumps were eight hours, twenty seven minutes apart, rather than the eight hours, eight minutes that Yan was used to from the Dreams . She knew that amount of time in her bones, because it set a maximum limit of how long she would be able to sleep while aboard; feeling the ship jump always woke her up, no matter how deeply she was sleeping.
“We just jumped about an hour ago, and it’s twelve more jumps to the outside of the Olar starzone, and then one last one to the planet.”
“That’s not so bad. We’re almost there. Think of it as vacation.”
“It’s not, though.”
Sid just shook his head. “Don’t you have any hobbies?”
“Like what?”
He shrugged, then reached behind himself into his open suitcase on the floor, shuffling around some of his underwear until he retrieved a hard bound book, the cover bearing Sid’s name in thick white marker scrawled across the black plastic. Yan had seen it before, sitting on the coffee table the few times she had visited Sid’s apartment, but she had never gotten too close of a look at it, assuming that it was just a notebook full of to-do lists or something else mundane. He handed it to her, and she flipped it open, revealing page after page of detailed graphite sketches, some artistic, others that looked like mechanical diagrams, all done in a very practiced and steady hand.
“I didn’t know you drew.”
“Don’t have a lot of time for it, these days,” he signed, then tugged the book back from her. He dropped it back down onto his lap. “But it’s something to do.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know if I have any hobbies,” she signed. “At the Academy, I would study, or hang out with Sylva, but that’s not a hobby. I’d go on nature walks when I had some time, but you can’t do that here .”
“What did you do on your family’s ship?”
“I worked , egghead,” she signed, exasperated.
“You weren’t working all day every day. There’s always somebody hanging out in the mess playing their instrument. You have one of those?”
“No, I just sang. No one ever bothered teaching me to play anything.”
“You any good at signing?”
“I’m alright, I guess. Wouldn’t win any awards, but I liked it.”
“Yeah? Sing me a song.”
Yan just glared at him, and Sid stuck out his tongue. She was about to suggest that if Sid had no better ideas, maybe they could watch a movie, or wander around the ship together, but any thought she might have had was interrupted by a sudden cold sensation, like water running down her spine, as she felt the unmistakable quiver of a huge release of power. It was a sensation that she had heretofore associated with excitement and coming home-- the feeling of a ship jumping into a port where Yan was standing waiting, the Iron Dreams arriving to take her home. But here, they were out in the middle of nowhere, and there should have been no ship jumping anywhere near them. She froze, her thoughts grinding to a sudden, panicked halt.
Stolen story; please report.
Sid noticed the distress on her face, because he leaned towards her. “You okay?”
“Does the Sky Boat have a--” And Yan realized that she didn’t know the sign word for it, so she was forced to speak out loud-- “Gravimeter?”
“How would I know? Why?”
“I think I just felt a ship jump in.”
“You think?” Sid gestured to his head in a very sardonic way. “Did you or did you not?”
“I--” Yan’s wide-eyed expression must have finally gotten through to Sid, because his face grew serious, and he nodded at her.
Sid stood. “We should tell Lieutenant Cesper.”
“We should tell Captain Lida--”
“I’ll go find Cesper,” Sid said. “You tell the captain.”
“She won’t trust me.”
“That’s her problem, then,” Sid said.
Sid was right, of course. Regardless of if Lida believed her or not, it was Yan’s responsibility to tell her. She hurried up and out of Sid’s room, running through the thin gravity of the ship’s rotating rings with the kind of confidence that only spacers had, searching for anyone who she could report this information to, mainly heading directly for the bridge.
She caught sight of Joun, the captain’s son and second in command, emerging from the library. Yan called out to him. “Joun!” She was out of breath.
He turned, smiling. “Apprentice BarCarran,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Do you have a sensitive gravimeter?” she huffed.
“What kind of sensitive are we talking about?” he asked, brow furrowing.
“I felt a ship jump in,” she said.
“Felt?”
“Yes, it’s-- I can--” She was struggling to explain herself. “Can you check?”
“How far away?”
This question brought Yan up short. She had no way of knowing how far distant she could sense a ship’s jump. When ships jumped in to a station she was waiting on, she could sense them, but that was always such a close event that she could hardly miss it. She wouldn’t have been able to feel anything while on the surface of Emerri; the crowded feeling of being on a planet compressed her effective range. And she had never felt a ship jumping outside of a star system. “I don’t know,” Yan admitted.
“Can you tell where it is?”
“I don’t know-- I’d have to-- Maybe.”
Joun was frustrated. “Walk with me, BarCarran.” But he was less walking, and more running. Yan followed him towards the bridge.
She had been on the bridge before as a guest, and it looked the same then as it did now, the same Migollen family members sitting at their various stations. Not many were there, as they were in the middle of waiting to jump again, and nowhere near a port where they would need to be coordinating the unloading and loading of cargo. Captain Lida was nowhere to be seen.
“Hey! Mikkie,” Joun said, getting the attention of a young woman doodling in a notepad at one of the consoles.
“Yeah?”
“Give me the grav readings for the past, what, ten minutes.”
“Grav readings?” She sighed. “Fine.”
“Don’t give me attitude. You’re supposed to be watching.”
“That’s what the alarms are for,” she said, but she was already pulling up something on her display. “Whoop-de-do.”
She scooted out of the way, and Joun and Yan leaned over the chart. It was a little noisy, the line moving up and down corresponding most likely to one of the Sky Boat ’s shuttles moving around outside, or the variations in density of the rings as they rotated. But Yan squinted at the chart at the exact moment of time that she recalled feeling the unmistakable sensation of power wash over her. There. There was a blip, a tiny uptick in the gravitational force the ship was experiencing. She pointed it out to Joun.
“I think that’s it,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
Yan’s heart had settled somewhere down into the pit of her stomach. She felt nauseous. “Yes,” she said.
Joun snapped into action. “Mikkie, go wake up Captain Lida. Chel, I need dogfighters out, now. Shuttles in. Put us on alert. Get people suited up, put everybody else in the saferoom. Let’s move.” The urgency in his voice was obvious, and the bridge crew rushed into action. Joun turned to Yan. “You and your party should go to the saferoom.”
“But--” Yan began, about to protest that they could be of use. After all, she and Sid were sensitives, and they were accompanied by a whole squad of highly trained members of the Fleet as part of their guard detail.
The door of the bridge opened, and Lieutenant Cesper strode in.
“Apprentice BarCarran,” Cesper said. “As per our contract with the Sky Boat , in case of an emergency, we are to evacuate to a shuttle and wait for rescue.”
“But--” It went against every bone in her body to evacuate from a ship in the case of a pirate attack. Any self-respecting spacer would have preferred almost anything to the cowardice of running away, as well as the ever-present fear that no one would ever come rescue them, stranded out alone in a shuttle.
“This is the order that was given to me by First Sandres,” Cesper said. “It is my duty to keep you and Apprentice Welslak safe.” He was clinging to the tiny sliver of authority he had on the ship.
Yan looked over at Joun, who was no longer paying her any attention at all.
“Where’s Sid?” she asked.
“Already boarding the shuttle,” Cesper said. “We need to hurry.”
Yan clenched her fists. The last thing she wanted was to abandon Sid by himself. And if Joun and the rest of the Sky Boat ’s crew didn’t want her to help, she wouldn’t be of much use stuck in the saferoom. With one final glance behind herself at the bridge, Yan gritted her teeth and nodded, following Cesper out and to the shuttle bay.
The shuttle bay was a hive of activity, their little team checking and loading the shuttle that they had reserved as theirs. Sid was already strapped in to a seat and he waved Yan over. She slid in next to him, and it was only a moment later that Iri filed in too, squeezing in to the cramped shuttle interior.
“I suppose Captain Lida had her right to complain about us,” Iri said. “We’re nothing but trouble.” But even her light tone couldn’t shake Yan’s anxiety. She dug her nails into her knees as the pilot of the shuttle closed the last of the doors and started running through the pre-flight checklist, the radio crackling to life to speak with the Sky Boat control to open the bay. It took some negotiation. Yan’s heart constricted further as the radio-operator on the bridge of the Sky Boat made some comment about abandoning ship. But the oxygen-warning alarms began to wail and flash soon enough, and then the door was open into the peaceful blackness of space.
No matter how Yan strained her eyes looking out into the starry spread, she couldn’t see any evidence of a pirate ship in the distance. Nor would she, of course. The ship itself wouldn’t dare to approach. It would only be its small army of dogfighters that would come to harry the Sky Boat , trying to breach its defenses so that they could land a boarding party and kill the whole crew inside.
The shuttle launched, pressing them all back into their seats as they left the bay, accelerating away from the ship. Pushed back into their seats for what felt like an eternity, no one spoke. After some time, the pilots killed the engine, so that their shuttle would be as undetectable as possible, and simply waited in silence. The Sky Boat itself was still visible outside their window, and it would be for some time, but it was distant now, and receding slowly into a less and less distinct point of light.
The pilot and co-pilot were hunched over the controls, their eyes trained on the shuttle’s pathetic sensors, hoping to avoid detection. The radio was silent; the Sky Boat had no reason to broadcast to her own dogfighters that she had sent out, and likewise the dogfighters had no desire to reveal their locations by sending radio messages back. The only sound in the shuttle was the hum of the electronics, the whirr of the air filters, and the harsh sound of everyone’s breathing. Lieutenant Cesper stared out the window, his thin fingers anxiously stroking the knees of his uniform. Iri looked across at him with a far steadier gaze. Sid had his glasses propped up on his forehead and his eyes closed, his head tilted back against his seat cushion. Yan’s head moved back and forth like a darting minnow, looking between all of the shuttle’s passengers in turn.
Iri grabbed her hand. “We’ll be fine,” Iri said.
That wasn’t what Yan was worried about, not in the least, but Iri’s heavy hand steadied her, and Yan squeezed it. It gave her the strength to reach over to Sid and take his hand. With his eyes closed, he was completely cut off from the outside world, but his palm was sweaty. When Yan grasped his hand, he entwined his fingers with hers, and she sent a pulse through the power-- communication. They could speak, at least, holding hands like this.
What’s going to happen? Sid asked in the power. His hand twitched in hers as he formed the words.
Yan sent back a jumble of images, diagrams that she half-remembered from her childhood aboard the Iron Dreams . They had trained extensively against pirate attacks, though none had ever happened in her lifetime. She showed him images of dogfighters emerging from the darkness of space, engines off so that they wouldn’t be detected until they were close, just cruising on momentum, attacking the ship and its defending dogfighters. They would blast open holes in the bay doors of the ship, then hook on great grappling hooks to keep their dogfighters and shuttles steady as their boarding parties climbed down inside. There would be bloody fights in the halls, knife on knife, and the pirates would slaughter their way to the center of the ship. And when they reached the stardrive--
Sid stopped her. He wanted to know if she really thought the Sky Boat would lose its battle.
Yan didn’t actually know. She knew how many dogfighters the Sky Boat had, but she didn’t know how many the pirates were bringing. And that was going to be the determining factor. That, and how well they fought inside the corridors of the ship. The crew of the Sky Boat would have the advantage of familiarity with the environment, but she thought about Halen, how huge he was compared to her, or any average sized spacer, and she couldn’t help but shudder. If it came to a knife fight between her and Halen, she would lose, no question about it. And she had to imagine the same thing would happen over and over, within the guts of the ship. If they were allowed to board-- Yan couldn’t keep her thoughts from spiraling.
Sid snapped her out of it. Look for how many shuttles the pirates have , he suggested. Then you can tell how it’s going to go. We should be able to feel them with the power, if they come close enough to the Sky Boat, right?
That was true. She almost didn’t want to know. From this far out, the power was much more sensitive than any of the shuttle’s sensors, and she would probably even have more information about the impending conflict than even the Sky Boat herself had. Would it be worse to know a disaster was coming?
Yan leaned towards Iri, who offered her ear. “Should I look to see how many dogfighters the pirates have?” she asked.
“If you can find out where they are, it will tell us if we need to be running or not,” Iri said. “I didn’t know you had that much range. I was told you only could stretch a few city blocks at most.”
“On Emerri,” Yan said. “In an atmosphere, with everything around-- there’s too much information to process. In space it’s…” She trailed off, Iri’s thumb stroking the back of her hand. Sid was still squeezing her other hand.
Yan steeled herself and stretched out her awareness in the power. Since she knew, broadly, the direction the pirates would be approaching from, she could increase her range still further. The power raced away from her, singing across the emptiness of space unimpeded, only sending a ripple of information back to her when she sensed something: a stray particle of gas, the electromagnetic tingle of light passing through her awareness, the fuzzy tug of gravity around where the Sky Boat sat heavily in space, and-- there-- the cold tang of metal, the whisper of confined air, and the hot and alive sensation of pilots and bodies in dogfighters and waiting shuttles.
Yan had been on the Sky Boat long enough to recognize what their crew felt like in the power. Though she wouldn’t have been able to call them out by name, or say what they looked like, it was like how she had recognized Iri before she had even met her: everyone’s presence in the power was distinct and memorable, and she could easily distinguish them from the pirates. Yan took her count, and she coiled tighter and tighter in seat as she did. Iri’s thumb roved over her hand, but it no longer comforted her in the least. There were almost twice as many pirates in dogfighters than there were from the Sky Boat, and that number didn’t even include the lurking shuttles full of boarding parties. Even if each one of the Sky Boat ’s dogfighters were victorious, the ship was still in trouble. Yan wasn’t sure if they could even inflict enough damage to deter the pirates from boarding-- they were committing so many people to this operation, they must be truly desperate and unlikely to give up, no matter the cost.
Sid could feel her anxiety. What’s happening? he asked. She loaned him her awareness, showing him the locations of the pirate shuttles and dogfighters, and their overwhelming numbers.
They’re going to lose? Sid asked.
The thought of it nearly crushed Yan. She was paralized for a moment, but could feel the pirates creeping closer with her power still outstretched and something in that spurred her into action. In a voice that nearly broke, she said, “Lieutenant Cesper, we have to go back.”
“Yan--” Iri said, but when she saw the feverish light in Yan’s eyes, the glint of the sparse colored lighting inside the shuttle glinting off Yan’s black irises, whatever objections she had died in her mouth, and she squeezed Yan’s hand.
“Apprentice BarCarran,” Cesper said, “it’s my sworn duty to keep you and Apprentice Welslak safe. We will not be returning to the Sky Boat until the danger has passed.”
“We have to,” Yan said. “There’s too many pirates, I can tell you where they are! We have to at least warn them.”
The pilot spoke up. “That would reveal our location, Apprentice,” he said. “The Sky Boat ’s crew are well trained. They can handle this.”
“Please,” Yan begged. “They’re not going to be able to keep them out.”
Cesper’s expression was one of stifled pity, and his fingernails dug into the legs of his pants. “I’m sorry, Apprentice BarCarran. I can’t disobey orders from First Sandreas.”
Sid squeezed her hand. What do you want me to do? he asked.
Yan didn’t know what she wanted, but she returned the squeeze, and that gave Sid enough of an excuse to move.
Sid pulled his hand out of Yan’s and unbuckled himself. “Order the pilot to go back, Lieutenant Cesper,” he said aloud. His glasses were back on his nose, but his eyes were still closed. “We go back, or I swear to God I will take control of this ship and have Yan fly us back herself. Don’t think I won’t.”
Sid’s minder Hernan, Iri’s counterpart, reached out to grab Sid’s cassock sleeve and pull him back into his seat, but Sid evaded the grab nimbly, without even opening his eyes. Hernan could have tried harder, but he didn’t.
“I can and I will,” Sid said, repeating himself. “Your choice, Lieutenant.”
Cesper looked up at Sid, now towering over him by virtue of floating untethered in the shuttle’s confined interior. He looked back at Yan, his expression pleading for her to get Sid to back down.
“Please, Lieutenant,” Yan said. “We have to help them.”
The air of authority went out of Cesper in a slump as he looked between the two apprentices. “How close to the Sky Boat do you need to be?”
Sid opened his eyes at last. He must have been using the power to understand what Cesper had been saying. He looked at Yan for an answer to the question.
The reality of what she had been pleading to do, now that she was in a position to do it, chilled her. Her voice belonged to someone else when she answered, flat-toned but strangled, “Close enough to see them on the scope.” She wouldn’t be able to use the power to sense the locations of the broad field of ships while she was acting.
Hernan tugged on Sid’s sleeve. “Sit down so we can accelerate,” he said. Sid complied, if reluctantly, narrowing his eyes in an implicit threat that he wouldn’t be tricked. But he sat down.
Yan took his hand again. Through the power she offered him an image, a task: use the power to cool the engines and exhaust while they accelerated, so that they wouldn’t show up as a bright dot on the pirates’ sensors. He nodded and closed his eyes.
You’ll take care of the rest? he asked.
We’ll stop accelerating when we get close enough. I’ll need your help.
She didn’t have a plan. But she did implicitly understand all of the factors at play, and it hardly mattered that her ideas were visceral rather than logical. She enumerated them in her mind.
Every spacer intimately understood the physicality of the laws of motion, far better than anyone who had lived on the ground their whole lives did. Every dogfight was a battle of physics. Everyone grasped the amount of strain you could put on your own body and ship while accelerating, the careful lining up of your ammunition’s momentum to strike your opponent, the calculated dance you had to play with the universe itself, almost as much as you were playing against your enemy.
The image behind her eyes thinking about this was not of dogfighters, but of a shipping container that weighed thousands of tons snapping free of its confines and crashing into a single, tiny, unaware figure.
She pushed the image away as far as she could, and the thought that replaced it was barely better: Halen demonstrating to them how they could kill, should they need to. He had said that the three apprentices didn’t have an instinctive grasp on the momentum of a bullet, and that may very well have been true, but Yan did not lack a grasp of the weight of dogfighters and the limits of a human body.
These fights, between the dogfighters, and with the Sky Boat , they were operating on an even playing field: one where the rules of physics were the same for everyone. But Yan and Sid… If she chose, Yan could bring a dogfighter moving in her reference frame at a hundred kilometers a second to a dead halt without even breaking a sweat. It could be moving faster than her eyes could track, and she could still probably do it. She wouldn’t even have to touch the person inside with the power. In fact, she couldn’t, and that was what made it deadly.
By the time that their shuttle was within visual range of the action, the fight had already begun. At least one of the Sky Boat ’s dogfighters was already destroyed, reduced to constituent parts spread out in a wide swathe of space, only identifiable by the barely visible paint job-- blue and white of the Sky Boat ’s livery.
Their pilot killed their engines, leaving them drifting still fairly far from the ship and out of harm’s way. Sid shook himself out of the half-trance he had been in, keeping their emissions from showing up on anyone else’s sensors. They were nearly invisible, unless someone knew exactly where to look for them.
What’s the plan ? Sid asked, looking to her for direction.
One of the Sky Boat ’s dogfighters was in trouble. A pirate ship was on its tail, and the spacer kept trying to throw it off by weaving in ever tighter circles, trying to find a way to escape the pirate’s barrage of ammunition. But there was a physical limit to how many times that could be done, and the spacer’s dogfighter was reaching that limit, and would soon be unable to avoid getting hit.
Holding hands with Sid, Yan mentally pointed out her focus, showing Sid how to identify the dogfighters that were in the most trouble, and then she gathered the power to the surface of her skin-- it was hot and crawling-- took a deep breath, and reached across the gulf of space to take hold of the pirate’s dogfighter. It was moving faster than the shuttle’s cameras could easily track, but once she had it in her mind’s eye with the power, she curled her fingers into its cold metal shell, and brought it to a complete stop in her reference frame.
The dogfighter itself was unharmed and whole, but the pilot inside, whom she had before been able to feel in the power, vanished.
She didn’t look with the power, but it didn’t take looking for her mind to conjure in vivid detail the interior of a shuttle exactly like the one she was in, covered in a thin and dripping film of gore, something that had once been a person, dispersed into a fine paste by meeting a hard wall moving at a non-trivial fraction of the speed of light.
Yan retched, coughing and choking on the bile that rose in her throat but couldn’t be properly expelled without gravity. She gagged and swallowed as much of it back down as she could, then took a shuddering breath and wiped her face on her sleeve.
Iri rubbed her back, but Yan’s mind was elsewhere, somewhere outside her skin. Sid had stopped looking at the fight to look at her with wide eyes.
Yan shook her head. Come on, she said to Sid.
That was enough to get him to move, and he pulled his hand out of hers. She could feel him focusing his power, reaching for one of the other dogfighters. But she had to ignore Sid. She had to ignore everything outside of the task that she was performing.
It became easier after the first time. As long as she spared no time to think between reaching out for one dogfighter and halting it, and then grabbing the next, it could be done without much effort. There was nothing simpler.
Though she kept her mind as blank as she could, her body still tensed, every muscle clenched, her nails digging into her palms. She didn’t notice how much her jaw hurt from grinding her teeth until she saw the shuttles full of the pirates’ intended boarding parties begin to peel away and race back towards their ship, their few remaining dogfighters turning tail and retreating. Some of the Sky Boat ’s dogfighters started to chase them, but Yan didn’t think that they would be caught.
She felt Sid reaching for one of the fleeing shuttles, and she didn’t have enough left inside her to either egg him on or stop him. He looked over at her, and saw only her dead-eyed stare out the window. Sid hesitated for a moment, then just touched the pirate shuttle with his power, and let it go. Yan let out a rush of breath.
The whole battle-- if Yan could even call it that-- had been conducted in utter silence, and she had tuned out the breathing of the rest of the passengers of the shuttle. It was a shock to hear the pilot speak and request re-entrance to the Sky Boat ’s bays. It took so long for the ship to respond that Yan became convinced that they wouldn’t at all, that the empty hiss of the radio would continue forever. But then someone responded in the affirmative, and the pilot repeated the instructions, and the familiar tug of acceleration set Yan back into her chair.
As they approached the ship, Yan could see a gash in its side. One of the pirate dogfighters had managed to bow open one of the bays. They passed the ghost ships, the perfectly untouched pirate dogfighters sitting still, their engines still purring but their pilots vaporized. They dodged the debris of the few fights that had happened before they had returned to the scene. And then they slipped into the bay that had opened its doors for them, turning to settle on an empty spot on the wall, the magnetic hold pulling them into place.
Yan was exhausted and numb, and didn’t register Iri trying to speak to her, asking if she was alright. She just nodded absently in reply, though she would have nodded in response to any question asked of her. Her jaw was clenched so tightly that her teeth might break. Next to her, Sid had his eyes closed again, and his arms folded across his chest, the fabric of his cassock bunched up in his fists, pulled tight across his back and chest.
It took a long time for the bay to repressurize, and when it did, before anyone in their party could even open the shuttle and get out, while Yan was still fumbling with her seatbelt with fingers that didn’t feel like they belonged to her, the door at the end of the bay slid open, and Joun Migollen entered, flanked by several of his red-headed family members.
To Lieutenant Cesper’s credit, he exited the shuttle first and asked, “Is there something you need?” while interposing himself between Joun and the two apprentices. The other fleet soldiers in Cesper’s coterie, as well as Iri and Hernan, surrounded Yan and Sid as they exited the shuttle, shielding them from the visible hostility in the Migollen family’s posture.
“I would like to speak with Apprentice BarCarran,” Joun said, spotting Yan among the huddle. They couldn’t very well leave the bay without passing by Joun, so Yan steeled herself and used Iri’s steady shoulder as a lever to push herself forward in the bay, drifting out and away from the group until she stopped herself by scraping her shoes along the floor. Though Joun’s family members were glaring at her with outright disgust on their faces, they almost flinched as Yan came closer.
Yan could barely form any cogent thought, but the one that coalesced in her brain as she saw the spacers twitch away in fear was strange. Was this the way that she looked from the outside, when she saw Halen?
Yan came to a complete stop before the waiting spacers. She stood silently in front of Joun and did not meet his eyes.
“Apprentice BarCarran,” Joun said, “I assume that was you.” There was no need to elaborate, of course.
Yan nodded, still silent. She couldn’t open her mouth to give Sid equal credit.
Joun sounded like he was reading from a script when he spoke next, though he must have had very little time to prepare it. “Captain Lida would like to thank the Imperial government for the services rendered to the crew of the Sky Boat . As payment, we will waive the expense of your passage to Olar.”
Cesper came up beside her. “I appreciate that,” he said. “May we leave the bay?”
“No--” Yan managed to croak out. “Mutual defense--”
Though Joun kept his gaze steady and his mouth shut, the younger man at his right hand said, “You abandoned ship,” he said. “Don’t pretend like you’re part of mutual defense .”
Yan could say nothing in her own defense. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. It was true: if there was one thing that a spacer, a true spacer, would never do, it was get in a shuttle and run away from the family ship when it came under attack.
“We came back,” Sid said. “Isn’t that enough for you?” He was resolutely ignored by Joun.
“Furthermore,” Joun said, “Captain Lida requests that you remain in your assigned quarters until we reach Olar.”
Sid narrowed his eyes, about to say something, but Cesper said, “We have no intention of causing any trouble for you or the rest of the crew.”
For the first time, Joun deviated from the script. “It’s for your own sake,” he said.
The animosity coming from Joun’s family members was thick in the air. Yan just nodded.
“We’ll escort you back to your rooms,” Joun said, and turned back towards the door. Everyone shuffled after him.
As they passed through the cold halls of the Sky Boat , Yan realized that nobody had mentioned that her family would hear about her behavior. She wasn’t even enough of a spacer for her family to be made ashamed of her.